michael

108, 112, 116 three days, three records. You have heard of it. We are happy it is over. Today on a walk in the mid-70s we even got rained on. Back to normal.

This typing comes to you from a new to me, well sorta, typewriter. It is a 1970 Hermes in the Type Space. Type Space being a new place in Portland. They have banks of typewriters for sale, or for a loan, like this one. Anyone can come in, see a machine he or she likes, and give it a whirl. They do repairs — at the encouragement of Matt of Ace Typewriter, he is backed up by three months or so. He tells people to come down here. So, I don’t need to feel guilty. And I did, brought in a Royal Mercury for refurbishment. And, it turns out I am the first customer. I gave them a dollar – their first dollar. Damn, there is happiness floating through the air. OK, I am really excited to be the first person here. Well, the first one to submit a repair to be done. I told him, Mark the tech, to not worry about how long it takes to do the work I have other typewriters. The other people here are Julia and Tony, the owners, and a half dozen people checking the place out. There is a mini-museum of typewriters dating back to the late 1800s. From the 20s to the 70s, well those are for sale and on view and touching. What can I say, this new space is full of happy people lost of typing in the air.

It is good to be back.

—- MichaelRpdx

What had happened? All we knew was that four people were dead and it had happened about 10:00 or so. And a lot of cops had shown up. That was it. Everything from 42nd Ave to down below our house was enveloped in it was big and untalked about. We were approaching 12 hours after the event and there was not any information being released.

We had planned to visit my mother-in-law in Salem. We would need to leave by 9:00 for that. I walked down to the police car blocking Cesar Chavez. I walked down the middle of the street. A small pleasure.

Can we leave the area in our car?
Yes, we will let you in and out.

We decided to go ahead. There was nothing to do that would do any of us any good. I did call my Mon.

Hi Mom
Well hello, how are you today?
I’m calling to tell you something before you hear it on the news.
OK
Four people were shot on our street.

We put up an alert on Facebook. It would not be good for people to read about four people being shot on our street and not a thing revealed. My wife thought it was the occupants of the “chop shop”. A shabby little house that always had four new cars parked tightly. There was a pregnant woman and a six-year-old boy living there. That would be gruesome.

It used to have a saying “If you want to know it, read The Washington Post”. They had broken the story about Senator Bob Packwood and his affinity for underaged women. This time around The Oregonian had the story. Three men from Texas arrived in order to buy marijuana, tubs of the stuff. The deal went bad. Two of them and two men who lived in the house were killed and one fled in a van.

That is what we know now.

— MichaelRpdx

PS: My erasure, eraser had run out. Sorry about that.

Creeping up on midnight, after 11:00 at least, already. The house was dark. The doorbell rang. In the darkened house close to midnight. My wife got up and went to the door. There was a police officer there. She answered, “just a moment while I get a mask.”

“Have you heard anything unusual tonight?”
“No.”

She realized something was wrong. There were a dozen cop cars in front of our house. Blue lights flashing on them all.

“Spell your name with two Ns?”
“Yes. Good of you to notice.”
“My name has two Ls.”

The police officer was shaken. Whatever she had seen was not good. They finished up the conversation and the cop left. She went to the window and looked out. Wow, twelve cars that she could see. There was an officer looking back into her eyes. She quit watching.

Back in bed, she told me, “there are twelve cop cars out there.” I was asleep. I moaned a response and drifted off into the night.

In the morning I got up early as usual. Nested into the couch going through the internet. Settled into watching a Bob Ross painting video. Halfway through my wife came out, “four people were killed on our street.” “What?” I said as I took off the headphones. “Four people were killed on our street.”

I got up and looked out. There were still cop cars visible. There was red tape strung across our yard, across the lots across the street. There was red tape as far as I could see.

I went outside and down to the street. Looking down there was a car with flashing lights blocking access from Cesar Chavez, blocking in or out. Looking up the street there was a bunch of police vehicles.

I went back inside. We checked the news. All of it this early was the same. Four people killed on Boise Street between Cesar Chavez and 42nd. It happened around 10:45. That was all.

— MichaelRpdx

Dreams With Sharp Teeth – it is great, go watch it.

We are also watching a love story for New Haven, Connecticut. Well, in reality, it is a love story for the apizza. The rest of us call it pizza. But this place filled with Italian immigrants called it apizza and so it is. Three places hold the honor of being “the” place for the style. Pepes, Sally’s, and Modern. It is a long story, filled with history and profiling each of the three places. If you want to know about this dish, go watch this story. It is called “Pizza, A Love Story” and it is on Curiosity Stream.

If you do not know of Curiosity Stream, well it is your lucky day because you get to find out about it today. Curiosity Stream is a place that hosts a bunch of things to watch. You know, like Netflix. Only the difference is Curiosity Stream has nothing but documentaries. Now, no they are not all great. Some are awful. But there are plenty of good and great ones. And, here is the killer. For HD quality you can get an annual subscription for $19.99. That is two months of Netflix. And yes, no commercials.

It is a great place.

—— MichaelRpdx

Love you like a mango. It is twilight, in the evening, and I am waking up. Gotta wka wk wake up, stay up, stay up long enough for a good night of sleep.

Wake up, stay up, wake up. That sounds like something from a reggae song. That is how you can wonder about how they came up with what they have for us to listen to.

Buckle up kids, this ain’t going to make sense. I am just going to blurb it out. Confession time. I do not floss regularly. Sometimes months without doing it. Now I have a thing where I keep track of it. Huh?

I have a page in my journal/notebook/writing thingy that I greatly track what I do on a daily basis. You maybe have heard of “don’t break the chain” something that allegedly is based on Jerry Steinfeld’s habit of having a calendar that he puts a red X on every day he writes a joke. He has a long chain of days red Xed out from the chain of days in which he has written jokes. I have similar things where I track whether or not I have gone something like Duoling (now at 871 days), Morning Pages (which I track based on pages, now over halfway through the 24th Composition Book), reading, writing, watercoloring, and so on. I am now doing that for flossing my teeth, I am at five. My phone has, and I will bet yours does it also, have an alarm. Like people use for waking up. Which I have not used for waking up in years (decades?) I wake up in the morning and it is early enough for things that need to be gone in the morning. Well, I have my alarm set for 8:30 at night every day. And I use it as the time to floss my teeth and take my evening medications. It works so far. It is an “Atamoic errgh Atomic Habits (book title??) my trigger to floss is to shut off the alarm and start in on what needs to do daily, every day, until they are complete. As for One Typed Page…

As you know my pages are not a daily thing. Like Spanish, Morning Pages, and the other things that are habits.

Here is a paradox: I prefer reading things that are not personal. People’s bits of fiction and observations about the world, book reviews, those I like. Yet, here I am: contributing to pages with observations about myself and what is going on with me. I am trying to break that habit. It is hard.

What about fiction told in the first person? Ummmm, well, Yeah that is it! Everything you read here is a lie. It is a lie in that it is all fictional. Yeah, right, everything you are reading is about some character. Told from his point of view. Kinda like Hemingway, so much of his “fiction” was based on his life. I went decades not knowing that. (Same applies to Richard Brautigan, all from his life.) Maybe it all is like that. At least some core parts of it. With some embellishment.

Well, I believe I have streamed along for far enough for one Daily Page. Now to pay attention to my life and find stuff to write about.

— MichaelRpdx

There I was, lying on my back. Someone’s fingers were in my mouth.

Yes, a dental appointment. It would be great to meditate. What else are you going to do for an hour? Conversations were out of consideration.  Yes, let us keep our minds on the breaths. Like you can pay attention to that while stabs of pain come from those wire thingy things crawl under your gums and scrape stuff off of your teeth. Real conducive to just watching the breath come and go. Meditating on the subject of your experiences?
Six probes on each of the 32 teeth followed up with the scraping.

While I tried to keep my attention on the in and out of breathing I detoured to “relax” as I felt my shoulders tensing up. Relax, and my shoulders would go from tense to a semi-relaxed state. Relax again and I stayed somewhat relaxed for a bit. I kept drifting off to some meditative state. Until OW and I felt like I was ready to climb out of the chair. And I felt, again, stiff shoulders and returned to “relax.” What else are you going to do for an hour, laying on your back, with someone’s fingers doing what they needed to do.

I used to bring earbuds and listen to a podcast or two. What is better?

— MichaelRpdx

Forever you find
there is a bottle of Sriracha, almost empty
a player piano. They have not made them, in that form, the original form
that was invented in the aughts, of 1900, of the year.
on top there are hundreds of rolls, the kind you use to play them
you can find them, the songs, waiting to be played again.

there is a bottle of Sriracha, almost empty
I was waiting for something
I was waiting for a while. What was I waiting for with a bottle of Sriracha?
Could it be a bowl of dan—dan noodles? Some scrambled eggs? The wonderings,
the musing, the mental searching was interrupted.
It was a book. A signed book. The Anthropoenene Reviewed* anthropocene, yes
that is it.

— MichaelRpdx

* I was reading the title of the book from the book and I still misspelled it. geeze

Somebody, somebody here, asked about storing One Typed Daily pages. Or maybe it was asked what does one do with these pages. It has been written. It was sent to Danial for “publishing” here. Then you have a piece of paper with daily thoughts on it. What to do then?

I, for one, keep them. And thanks to the asking of the question I now have most of them in a three-ring binder. The rest of them will be added when I find them. Hopefully, it will not be another saga of the library books.

Why do something like this?

First is being able to read them. This is not a case of my handwriting. Where reading whatever I wrote is pretty iffy. Not like the days in the hospital after having a stroke. Reading those pages – good luck. But now, well if I slow down and take my time I can read them. But anything typewritten is guaranteed to be readable.

Second is the intent. What did I write about? Sometimes I do not understand what I was writing about. But going back and reading them again I will get some understanding of what I was thinking about. Which can lead to even more things.

Next, it is mine. Even the worst of what I have written (and this applies to your writings and you) is a part of yourself. There are kernels of goodness lurking in these pages. Now I have them here to read again.

— MichaelRpdx

My wife got her second vaccine today. We are celebrating. Not the most conducive state of mind for writing.

He picked up a pencil, picked up a journal. Or they called them journals. I was just a book. Something to write in. Something to put down thoughts. That is what a journal is for. It is for getting your thoughts. All of them. It keeps you from

And then he cut off the narrative. He was not ready to have the protagonist telling the world about all the things that were there to be told. He needed to have them come out each on their own. Or did he?

For the first time in a long time, he was alone for the night. That is the benefit of a vaccine. It allowed her to go out for the night.

So what would you do in a morning with the sun slinking out from the horizon?

John Prine had a bunch to say in so few words. Others among us say a lot of words without saying anything. Which one has something to say at the end of a day?

2:00 or 3:00, those are the hours that I am awake. Not a great time to be up or at least awake. What do you do when you are awake?

I have not a thing to say. or as I could say it, “Got nuthin to say.”

—— MichaelRpdx

PS – I quit writing tonight because my wife came home from book club, here is something to hear about.

What a beautiful, summer day. What? Wait a second now here. Summer is still a month away. This is springtime. Where has it gone? Where are the rains? But since we can turn off the heat and wake up to comfortable days, reminders, reminding me of so many youthful days, well I had better quit complaining. These weather patterns are bringing happiness. I will enjoy the days.

A couple of months ago I read, actually read a book from start to finish, called Atomic Habits from James Clear. (If you want to know about it, ask me.) He also sends out a newsletter every Thursday called “3-2-1: On character, the process of improvement, and mastering one thing.” It involves three quotes from himself, two quotes from people with great things to say, and one question. The question is for you, the person who received the newsletter. This week’s question brought a smile.

What is a small pleasure
that brings me great joy?
Can I enjoy it today?

Aside from a memory of waking up in a friend’s house and feeling at home, I immediately thought of a daily thing that brings great joy. Every day. After writing Morning Pages, after checking my phone (no emails today), checking the backlog of emails from overnight, after taking my blood pressure and my morning meds, after those things my wife is usually getting up.

So I grind some and light the stove. Put on a Moka pot of what will be coffee. Make a pair of flat black coffees. We sit down on the couch and drink it together. That morning coffee with my wife is a daily pleasure.

Yes, I can enjoy it today.

What about you? What small thing can you do that will bring you joy?

— MichaelRpdx